Drawn and Quartered Quotes

“I have always struggled, with the sole intention of ceasing to struggle. Result: zero.”
― Emil Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

“While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning how to play a new tune on the flute. “What will be the use of that?” he was asked. “To know this tune before dying.” If I dare repeat this reply long since trivialized by the handbooks, it is because it seems to me the sole serious justification of any desire to know, whether exercised on the brink of death or at any other moment of existence.”
― Emil Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

“I do not struggle against the world, I struggle against a greater force, against my weariness of the world.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

“Every act of courage is the work of an unbalanced man. Animals, normal by definition, are always cowardly except when they know themselves know themselves to be stronger, which is cowardice itself.”
― Emil Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

“Boredom in the midst of paradise generated our first ancestor’s appetite for the abyss which has won us this procession of centuries whose end we now have in view. That appetite, a veritable nostalgia for hell, would not fail to ravage the race following us and to make it the worthy heir of our misfortunes.”
― Emil Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

“Shyness, inexhaustible source of misfortunes in practical life, is the direct cause, indeed unique, each inner wealth.”
― Emil Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

“Death is the solidest thing life has invented so far”
― Emil Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

“The state of health is a state of nonsensation, even nonreality. As soon as we cease to suffer, we cease to exist.”
― Emil Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

“If there was a common, even official form of killing oneself, suicide would be much easier and much more frequent. But since to be done with it all we must find our own way, we waste so much time meditating on trifles that we forget what is essential.”
― Emil Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

“But man is a strayed animal, and when he falls victim to doubt, if he should happen to take no further pleasure in attacking others, he turns on himself in order to inflict merciless tortures.”
― Emil Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

“In flawed families, a scion appears who dedicates himself to the truth and who ruins himself in its pursuit.”
― Emil Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

“It is of no importance to know who I am since some day I shall no longer be”—that is what each of us should answer those who bother about our identity and desire at any price to coop us up in a category or a definition.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

“If the waves began to reflect, they would suppose that they were advancing, that they had a goal, that they were making progress, that they were working for the Sea's good, and they would not fail to elaborate a philosophy as stupid as their zeal.”
― Emil Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

“The idea of the Eternal Return can be fully grasped only by a man endowed with several chronic, hence recurrent infirmities, and who thus has the advantage of proceeding from relapse to relapse, with all that this implies as philosophic reflexion.”
― Emil Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

“The more power man acquires, the more vulnerable he becomes. What he must fear most is the moment when, creation entirely fleeced, he will celebrate his triumph, that fatal apotheosis, the victory he will not survive.”
― Emil Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

“Conversation is fruitful only between minds given to consolidating their perplexities.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

“To that friend who tells me he is bored because he cannot work, I answer that boredom is a higher state, and that we debase it by relating it to the notion of work.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

“While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning how to play a new tune on the flute. “What will be the use of that?” he was asked. “To know this tune before dying.”
― Emil Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

“Impartiality is incompatible with the will to affirm oneself or quite simply with the will to exist. To acknowledge another’s merits is an alarming symptom, an act against nature.”
― Emil Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

“Consider carefully the merest event: in the best of cases, the positive and negative elements that participate in it balance out; generally the negatives predominate. Which is to say, it would have been preferable that it not take place. We should then have been dispensed from taking part in it, enduring it. What is the good of adding anything at all to what is or seems to be? History, a futile odyssey, has no excuse, and on occasion we are tempted to inculpate art itself, however imperious the need from which it emanates. To produce is accessory; what matters is to draw on one’s own depths, to be oneself in a total fashion, without stooping to any form of expression. To have built great cathedrals derives from the same error as to have waged great battles. Better to try to live in depth than to advance through centuries toward a débâcle.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

“In the Metro, one evening, I looked closely around me: everyone had come from somewhere else . . . Among us, though, two or three faces from here, embarrassed silhouettes that seemed to be apologising for their presence. The same spectacle in London.
Today’s migrations are no longer made by compact displacements but by successive infiltrations: little by little, individuals insinuate themselves among the “natives,” to anaemic and too distinguished to stoop to the notion of a “territory.” After a thousand years of vigilance, we open the gates . . . When one thinks of the long rivalries between the French and the English, then between the French and the Germans, it seems as if each nation, by weakening one another, had as its task to speed the hour of the common downfall so that other specimens of humanity may relay them. Like its predecessor, the new Völkerwanderung will provoke an ethnic confusion whose phases cannot be distinctly foreseen. Confronted with these disparate profiles, the notion of a community homogeneous to whatever degree is inconceivable. The very possibility of so heteroclite a crowd suggests that in the space it occupies there no longer existed, among the indigenous, any desire to safeguard even the shadow of an identity. At Rome, in the third century of our era, out of a million inhabitants, only sixty thousand were of Latin stock. Once a people has fulfilled the historical idea which was its mission to incarnate, it no longer has any excuse to preserve its difference, to cherish its singularity, to safeguard its features amidst a chaos of faces.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

“A discourse approaches universality when it frees itself from its origins, leaves them behind, disavows them: having reached this point, if it would reinvigorate itself, avoid unreality or sclerosis, it must renounce its own exigencies, break its forms and its models, it must condescend to bad taste.”
― Emil Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

“Începuturile noastre contează, desigur; dar pasul decisiv spre noi înșine nu-l facem decât atunci când nu mai avem origini, când biografia noastră e la fel de puțină ca a lui Dumnezeu...”
― Emil Cioran, Esercizi di ammirazione

“To grant life more importance than it has is the mistake committed in sagging systems; as a consequence, no one is ready to sacrifice himself to defend them, and they collapse under the first blows perpetrated upon them. This is even more true of nations in general. Once they begin to hold life sacred, it abandons them, it ceases to be on their side.”
― Emil Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

“What advantage would having faith be to me, since I understand Meister Eckhart16 just as well without it?”
― Emil M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

“Ona duyduğum ilgiye karşı koymaya çalışıyorum, gözlerinin, yanaklarının, burnunun, dudaklarının tamamen çürüyüp kokmuş halini gözümün önüne getiriyorum. Hiçbir şey değişmiyor: uyandırdığı tanımlanamaz şey olduğu gibi duruyor. Bu tür anlarda anlıyor insan Bilmeye rağmen hayatın nasıl devam edebildiğini.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

“Hiçbir şey tevazu sahibi yapmıyor insanı, ceset görmek bile.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

“Dertleniyoruz, çırpınıyoruz, canımızı dişimize takıyoruz, fedakârlık yapıyoruz, görünürde hepsi kendimiz için; aslında herhangi biri için, müstakbel bir düşman için, tanımadığımız bir düşman için. Bu durum ayrıca, toplumlar için bireyler için olduğundan daha da geçerli. Herakleitos yanılıyor: Yıldırım değil kâinatı yöneten, istihza yönetiyor her şeyi. Dünyanın kanunu istihza.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

“I try to oppose the interest I take in her, I imagine her eyes, her cheeks, her nose, her lips in a high state of putrefaction. No help for it: the indefinable element she releases persists. It is in such moments that one understands why life has managed to sustain itself, in spite of Knowledge.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

“I shall take the liberty of praying for you." – "Glad to hear it. But who will listen to you?”
― E.M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered